Openwave Mobility Anticipates Trends for 2013 in Policy Control and Over the Top Players

Openwave Mobility, a software innovator enabling operators to manage and
monetize growth in mobile video and web traffic, has predicted what
trends it expects for 2013.

The “New Consumer Economy” infiltrates mobile

John Giere, President & CEO, Openwave Mobility: “We live in a
world where consumers can buy just one song from an album, rent a car or
a meeting room by the hour and purchase a single TV episode. It is a
changed world, where people routinely buy or rent products and services
at a very granular level – and they are becoming used to the idea.
Because consumers have more options available in smaller slices, they
can find services and products which are much more focused on their
individual needs. Yet that choice and granularity has not reached mobile
data provision so far.

“In 2013, I believe we will start to see some of this thinking
infiltrating the mobile world with more examples of application-centric,
fine-grained data plans. “Buckets” of data have always been tricky, but
people will understand data plans that give you 50 hours of Internet
browsing, ten hours of video streaming or unlimited social media. It
takes a brave mobile operator to move away from the herd and package
their mobile data provision differently, but those that do can ride the
wave of this ‘New Consumer Economy’.”

“Policy Engagement” comes to the forefront

Indranil Chatterjee, VP Product Management & Marketing, Openwave
Mobility: “In 2013, as ‘policy management’ edges closer to becoming
ubiquitous in developed markets, ‘policy engagement’ will come to the
forefront. Up until now operators have been focused on simple policy
enforcement of data traffic such as blocking, throttling etc. Policy
engagement, on the other hand, focuses on richer and more meaningful
interactions with users that are consuming data. Users will receive
price plan offers and promotions based on how and when they interact
with content and network services. The network will start to act more
like a guide, delivering a ‘curated’ experience to users, via real time,
multi modal interactions that lend to easy adoption of new and
contextually relevant services. In summary, the goal of policy
engagement is to make these offers easy to understand, easy to adopt and
easy to manage for users leading to greater monetization of data
services for operators.”

Mobile data pricing starts to diversify

Michael Rodgers, Senior Strategist, Openwave Mobility: “Openwave
Mobility believes that mobile data pricing will diversify in 2013, which
will make the market more complicated and more interesting. One of the
reasons for this will be the increase in 4G adoption. Although many will
keep with similar pricing strategies used for 3G, for fear of alienating
subscribers there will be operators globally who adopt more innovative
ways of pricing their 4G data.

“This has already been demonstrated in the US, where one regional
operator has reported success with a lower-cost ‘no frills’
application-based data plan with a time-limited video streaming
allowance. This has allowed the operator to upsell video passes on a
daily, weekly or monthly basis, resulting in extra revenue from users
who want to upgrade while reducing network traffic from those who are
not interested in video enough to pay for it. This is all against the
backdrop of regulators globally keeping an increasingly close eye on
mobile data pricing and plans, meaning that left-field decisions in some
regions could force pricing innovation even if it is not currently
planned.”

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

Emerging markets will spur collaboration between mobile operators and
OTT

Stephane Honore, Chief Technologist, Openwave Mobility:
“Monetization opportunities of over-the-top content have appeared at the
top of analysts’ predictions for some time now; nevertheless, there have
been very few real and conclusive success stories so far. One of the
reasons is that the co-opetition status-quo between the major Internet
players and tier 1 operators is still more inclined towards service
competition which doesn’t incentivize them to jointly innovate in
saturated markets with high penetration of mobile data and Internet
services. In developing countries, however, both sets of players are
looking for ways to attract users and gain quicker service adoption as
the business growth will primarily come from mobile. Cooperation
initiatives will benefit both of them under these conditions. Facebook
has been an early adopter by pushing 0.facebook.com back in 2010; Google
has just recently joined the bandwagon with their Free Zone offering and
I expect more announcements of this type to surface in 2013.”

A few operators start to become true Over the Top players

Chris Goswami, Director Marketing & Communications, Openwave Mobility:
“At the end of 2012 we see three straight years of revenue decline for
operators in Europe, with at least one major group (KPN) having issued
profit warnings directly citing OTT (WhatsApp) as the cause. At the same
time we see Google apparently setting up their own network. So it’s not
just a question of OTT players eating the operators’ lunch, they are now
coming to dismantle the kitchen! Groups of operators launching OTT
initiatives together like JOYN or WAC just don’t work. Within these
complex organisations the web-DNA simply isn’t there.

“A few operators are taking a different approach. Telefónica Digital is
an independent unit of Telefónica headquartered in London and is
becoming the poster child for a new way of working. Recruiting staff
with software and web DNA, maintaining their own “fast-fail” product
development unit, and now responsible for all the new OTT services and
start-ups acquired by Telefónica including Jajah, Tuenti and GiffGaff,
are busy launching their own set of OTT services. This includes, for
example, “ToMe”, an OTT messaging and picture sharing app. Their clear
advantage is that they can utilise the massive subscriber base of
Telefónica to distribute these new services, create those new business
models and also reduce churn. They have even signed up to a revenue
target of €5Billion by 2015. I believe this new way of working will
spread and develop until these units become separate companies with
their own P&L and VC input beginning in 2013.”

Openwave Mobility delivers over 40 billion transactions daily and over
half a billion subscribers worldwide use data services powered by its
solutions. The company’s global customer base consists of over 40 of the
largest communication service providers including AT&T, Du, KDDI,
T-Mobile, Telefonica, Telstra, Virgin Mobile & Vodafone. Openwave
Mobility is owned by Marlin Equity Partners, a leading investment firm
with over a billion dollars of capital under management that has
publicly committed to building the company through expanded investment
in R&D. The company has built a robust portfolio of Intellectual
Property, which is growing month by month.

Openwave Mobility and the Openwave Mobility logo are trademarks of
Openwave Mobility Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their
respective owners.

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